Cara Valle
Visual Arts
Her naked skin, like morning glory long
uncut, hangs and clings in feral bunches.
She eyes the camera lens shyly and hunches,
arms over breasts. My trained eyes comb along
her outlines and methodically revise her:
I make her breasts routinely spherical,
her trunk a funnel grafted onto full,
neat tulip hips. This smooths and simplifies her.
She picks the baby up to nurse, ruining
my careful sketch. With eyes too tired to thresh
a tidy image out of her again,
I focus on the baby burrowed in
her downy arms—far easier than pruning
the equatorial jungle of her flesh.
The Fall of Poetry
You stand up, clinging to the second shelf,
and knead the carpet with your chubby feet.
you grin with pride, then start to feel yourself
lose balance. But you won't accept defeat:
you reach out blind and clutch a book of verse.
You fall. It falls on you. You scream and keen.
Just wait, my little guy: it gets much worse.
Just wait until you're my age and you've seen
your twenties—thirties—vanish in a puff
of smoke, with no trace where the years have gone to.
You'll realize then that books aren't firm enough
for holding on to.
Chocolate
I loved you light and milky as a child,
unwrapping waxy hunks from colored foil
at Halloween and Easter. You would spoil
my dinner, clog my throat, and drive me wild
with glucomania. Then, as I grew,
I learned to medicate myself with you.
The college vigils that you helped me through,
the cramps, each breakup's tearful residue—
I'm grateful. But, with each new year that passes,
my taste is for your dark and bitter layers.
I like dim light, sad novels, empty chairs:
I see the world through cocoa-colored glasses.
One day, I'll be sufficiently mature
to love life at its bitterest, most pure.
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| The Cheryl Yun Collection is a range of image-based sculptural objects or "products," from handbags to clothing, which simultaneously mirror and subvert fashion and consumer culture to reveal, question, and reevaluate one's relationship to the world.The Cheryl Yun Collection handbag series is handcrafted and features newspaper photographs of tragedy and catastrophe, religious and political conflict, as well as issues of beauty and control, while the Cheryl Yun Collection: lingerie and bathing suits is an image-based series of underwear, which questions the "victims" and "aggressors" of our current political, economic and religious conflicts.
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